What Cheer, Netop?

I wrote and recorded a new Interrobang Cartel song, 'The Anti-Piracy League'. It's another Garage Band extravaganza.

It's basically a children's song, maybe, although it could work as a logic puzzle if the title of the song hadn't already appeared twice in this message.

Additional vocals were provided by majorzed, kerri9494, Kerri's son Teddy, and urbeatle. manfire and Shiro Akaishi provided feedback on an earlier version of it. Thanks to all!

I put up the lyrics to plorkwort's Versicle on the Interrobang Cartel wiki. There are both Unicode and ASCII versions of the lyrics.

I'm interested to note that while Internet Explorer and Firefox on my Mac both get more than half of the symbols right, only Safari gets them all.

before I head off to New Hampshire to visit my sister's family.

It was really great! We were relaxed and played well, I think. There was a pretty small crowd but they were responsive and one person bought a copy of Chris's CD even.

We did two Interrobang Cartel songs, "Pumpkin, Mrs. Farnsworth" (my version) and Editors at War. The audience seemed to enjoy both. (Truth to tell they liked them a lot more than I expected.)

When I introduced Editors at War I told the following joke, which I got from plorkwort (who wrote the lyrics to the song):

Q: How many reference librarians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
( punchline )

The crowd laughed.

My flight last night got cancelled, so I didn't get home until today at around noon. It's very nice to be back.

I did a bunch of music stuff today (even though I said I'd finish updating the Interrobang Cartel website before I did anything else IC-related! Bad jwgh!). I think this might be because I've been away for a week during which I couldn't do anything musical, so it built up. Anyway, one of the projects is not really in a state that I want to make public yet, but hopefully it'll get done in the next week or so ... I don't quite have all my ducks in order yet.

The other musical thing I did today was throw together an arrangement for some lyrics plorkwort wrote earlier today (unfortunately the original article doesn't appear to be in Google yet, but here's a post that quotes them). I may twiddle with it a bit more but I think it's basically done. It's a folk ballad in a minor key called Editors at War. I got to use the broken banjo my father gave to me -- yay! (The peg for the drone string keeps falling out. Fortunately, I don't actually know how to play the banjo so this isn't really a problem for me.)

paracelsvs wrote a couple of C programs that allow me to convert files to and from the weird audio file format my digital recorder uses natively. (I could convert from but not to previously.) This should allow me to do all sorts of crazy things. Look for my music to become more annoyingly gimmicky in the future! (I doubt anyone else have much use for them, but if you have a pressing need to convert to or from the .aud sound format, let me know.)

I also got a half-price haircut today courtesy of a coupon kerri9494 mailed me, which was nice and which also got me out of my apartment for a chunk of the afternoon so I could enjoy the beautiful day.

I think I will sleep a very, very long time tonight. Ahhhhh.

One of the things I discovered while designing the Interrobang Cartel CD is that I really don't know what I'm doing. Here's some notes about making the CD while I remember them.

( Actually the notes are here )